Angus Kennard had a surname that already belonged on the building. He still had to apply for the job. When Kennards Hire needed a chief executive in 2016, the family connection came with an interview process rather than a coronation. For someone who had spent years inside the business, the questions were surprisingly personal: could he do the job, and did he actually want it?
By July 2020, he was choosing another beginning. Kennard left the chief executive’s role and co-founded Inauro with Craig Kesby, taking experience accumulated in equipment hire into a separate technology business. The family name remained familiar. The work ahead involved explaining why information from machines should travel further than the machines themselves.
There is a useful way to read the journey between those two decisions. Kennard repeatedly finds something worth building inside a business he understands, then changes his position so he can build it. A branch, a specialist rental operation, a software company: each gives him a different answer to the question of what comes next.
First, earn your way into the yard
The family’s original opening came in Bathurst in 1948, when Walter Kennard rented a concrete mixer to a customer who wanted to borrow it. A request at a counter became a business. Angus is the third generation of that family, with a career shaped by the opportunities and obligations of an established name.
His father required five years of work elsewhere before a permanent place in the company. Angus sold magazine advertising, photocopiers and forklifts. The rule gave him experience beyond the family’s own habits. It also meant the business could expect something more useful from a returning son than familiarity with the Christmas guest list.
He joined in 1996 at Brookvale on Sydney’s northern beaches. His early work included cleaning toilets. Grant Spradbrow became an important teacher of branch operations; Kennard later bought his father’s share in the branch, and the pair expanded to Mona Vale. He had entered a business with his surname above the door and learned what happened below it.
For a rental operator, knowing the equipment is only part of the job. There is also the customer’s timetable, the return, the repair and the next person waiting to hire it. That practical rhythm gives his later interest in software a particular setting. His technology career began with an understanding of the people expected to use it.
The attraction of an unfinished business
A comfortable operation did not hold his attention indefinitely. A visit to the World of Concrete exhibition in the United States exposed him to specialist equipment that could save labour on Australian building sites. The machinery was expensive. Rental offered a way for customers to use it without carrying the whole purchase price themselves.
Concrete Care grew from that opportunity. Kennard and Spradbrow developed the specialist business, adapting equipment and methods to the Australian market. After seven years it had five stores around the country. Kennard sold it to Kennards Hire in 2012, having turned a category of difficult work into a rental proposition.
He described a preference for starting businesses over running established ones. That preference helps make sense of Inauro years later. The chief executive’s office was one chapter in a career already comfortable with finding an opening, building around it and moving on.
“I was more interested in starting and creating businesses rather than running mature businesses.”
Angus Kennard
After the sale, he took a year in France with his wife and four children. His own father had once taken the family to Switzerland for a year. Angus spoke French and wanted to reconnect with the language. There were rides, drives and skiing trips. For a person accustomed to creating businesses, this was a deliberately different use of a calendar.
An MBA, an interview and 1,530 colleagues
Back at Kennards Hire, Kennard worked in assets and procurement. He then completed the University of Sydney’s Executive MBA in 2016. The course took him to India, Silicon Valley, London and France, widening the view beyond the familiar branches and equipment. He became CEO the following month.
Education here served a concrete purpose: he was testing his readiness for a role. In a family business, the question of competence arrives with extra baggage. An appointment must make sense to the board, employees and relatives, all of whom may have different memories of the applicant. A formal selection process helps give the answer weight.
The scale also made culture a practical concern. In early 2018, Kennards Hire shared a $7 million bonus among 1,530 staff. Eligible full-time employees with at least two years’ service received about $6,300 each. It was a tangible expression of how the business valued the people doing its daily work.
“Technology is increasingly important, but people come first,” Kennard said. The order matters when reading his next move. Software would eventually become his business, but the people at the counter and in the yard remained central to the problem he wanted it to solve.
Shared among 1,530 Kennards Hire employees.
In 2019, he received the Sustained Excellence Award at the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year awards. His work included the company’s digital transformation, with EasyTRAK telemetry and a partnership with Fleet Space Technologies. Tracking equipment was becoming part of how the rental business delivered its service, rather than an activity kept somewhere beside it.
The machine is talking. Who is listening?
Hire equipment spends much of its working life away from the branch. That creates a simple operational difficulty: the people responsible for it cannot always see what is happening. A machine’s location, operating time or fuel level can help, provided the information reaches someone able to act on it.
EasyTRAK, developed with Telstra Purple, brought information from a mixed fleet into a shared platform. It could give branch staff and the call centre alerts about equipment on hire. Fuel management and other services became possible because the business had more visibility of what was happening at customer sites.
The catch was connecting that visibility to the rest of the operation. A telemetry reading needed to relate to an asset, a hire contract and a customer. Kennard’s experience suggested that staff would not spend their day hopping between systems to assemble the picture. Useful information had to arrive with its context already attached.
By 2021, his description of the challenge put the operation first: technology should fit the work people needed to do. Interest from other construction businesses, then other industries, helped turn the internal experience into an independent venture. Inauro was founded in July 2020. Kennard stated that it had no operational or financial ties to Kennards Hire or the Kennards Group.
A familiar industry, a separate company
Kennard brought rental experience to Inauro; Kesby brought a background in IT, digital technology and data communications. Their Perspio platform connects equipment data with business systems to support operational workflows. The partnership joins knowledge of what happens in the yard with knowledge of how information moves beyond it.
SafetyCulture announced an AU$3 million investment in Inauro in 2022. There was a working connection as well as a financial one: their technologies had been integrated at Game Farm, a poultry supplier, to help oversee temperature control in a production facility. The application extended well beyond equipment hire while retaining the same need to connect information to everyday work.
In October 2025, Coates contracted Inauro to automate connected fleet, operations and rental management across its national branch network. Perspio would combine existing telemetry with systems including enterprise resource planning and maintenance software. Customer-facing plans included utilisation information and fuel reporting.
For Kennard, the deal gives the career story an interesting turn. Experience developed at one rental business had become a proposition another rental business could buy. The separate company could serve an industry. His family history supplied an education in the work; the software had to earn its place in someone else’s operation.
The next corner, and the next generation
Alongside Inauro, Kennard works on the less mechanical connections that hold family businesses together. As chair of Family Business Association in Australia, he has discussed independent directors, clear decision rights and written agreements. In 2025, he moderated a conference panel on aligning family interests and business structure, with leaders from Ranger, where he is a non-executive director.
He has described unclear boundaries as a particularly challenging part of family business. His advice on governance favours documenting the terms instead of relying on shared assumptions. Affection can coexist with disagreement. Putting the rules on paper gives people something steadier to work with when their recollections differ.
The long view remains part of his vocabulary. Asked about legacy while leading Kennards Hire, he wanted the business to be thriving in a hundred years. That ambition makes room for successors. It also requires decisions about who gets to lead, how they qualify and how everyone else participates.
His leisure offers a shorter horizon. Kennard is a keen rally driver who has competed in events including Targa Tasmania and the Snowy River Sprint. Asked about the attraction, he explained: “You can’t think about anything but the call on the next corner.” A century in one part of life; the next instruction in another.
Both horizons suit a career built around choosing when to move. Kennard has worked inside an inherited business, created a specialist operation and helped build an independent software company. The thread is attention to what needs doing next. There is always another customer waiting, another connection to make, another corner coming.